Death By Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline By Simon Parkin Melville House

272 pp; $33.95

Simon Parkin is one of the young stars of video game criticism, a genre fighting for popular legitimacy. With bylines in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and all the big-name gamer blogs, Parkin has been championing video game journalism as a serious critical practice since 2011. Unfortunately, it’s that very ambition that makes Parkin’s inability to transcend the familiar limitations of popular game criticism in his new book ultimately so disappointing.

Death By Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline is a loosely joined collection of pieces (some new, some previously published) that attempts to determine just what it is that makes video games so attractive, so appealing, so absorbing an art form.

Parkin’s central concept is “chronoslip,” or the capacity of video games to pull the player out of time until they’ve lost hours or even days to clicking through procedurally generated landscapes and battling pixelated adversaries. Parkin is no outsider looking askance at gamers frittering their lives away before a glowing blue screen, however.

Melville House

He readily shares personal anecdotes of his wife accidentally losing a full day to Animal Crossing (“Whoah,” she said, on being roused. “I am cold and hungry.”) and his own nocturnal gaming binges in his college days. But he’s primarily interested in the handful of tragic cases wherein young male gamers, mostly in Southeast Asia, died at their computers in the midst of marathon gaming sessions. What is it about video games, Parkin asks, that inspires such intense engagement?

Chapter by chapter, Parkin explores the potential of video games to offer us experiences and perspectives that are ordinarily inaccessible to us: windows to the inner lives of others, the intense drama of triumph or defeat, the novelty of discovering new worlds.

Some pleasures offered are more prosaic but also more poignant: “Superficially, at least, video games improve upon some aspects of our own reality,” Parkin explains. “For a human who has experienced life’s petty and major injustices, what better place is there to spend one’s time than in a virtual world, where struggle always leads to success, where effort is repaid in kind, where there is justice and glory for any and all who want it? In their ordered systems, we can catch a glimpse of a kind of prevailing justice, which our own world is often unable to match.”

Parkin’s elegant prose is often a pleasure to read. Ultimately, however, Death By Video Game trips over many of the same stumbling blocks that hamper most video game writing today. Its engagement with game studies or technology criticism is minimal – unfortunate because the underdeveloped “chronoslip” concept (eagerly introduced at the start but only intermittently called upon throughout the text) could have been bolstered by referencing Natasha Dow Schull’s discussion of slot machine-induced “flow state” from her classic Addiction By Design, for example.

Nor does Parkin make any mention of Robin Hunicke’s influential Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework, though it might have given his appraisals of various games a critical leg to stand on. Without reference to existing game studies or technology studies literature, Parkin’s arguments lack the gravity to answer the deep questions he poses.

By mostly focusing on gamers and designers like him, Parkin’s book misses its chance to reflect the complexity of the gaming landscape

Most unfortunate, however, is Parkin’s inability to take off video game criticism’s blinkers when it comes to gender. A book like Parkin’s should push past the limitations of its short form compatriots, adding detail, depth, insight and unheard voices and perspectives. Parkin, however, continually misses opportunities to amplify the voices of anyone other than those we’ve heard from before.

In a bizarre and frankly objectifying move, Parkin tells the tale of how the onscreen lesbian kiss at the 1999 launch of The Sims at E3 helped a young man come out of the closet (and how the lesbian kiss helped market the game to the straight male gamer demographic), but he doesn’t appear to have talked to any queer women about the impact such a representation might have had on them.

Furthermore, though the book is packed with insightful interviews, Parkin mentions only four female game designers by name, and presents extended interviews with only two of them, Zoe Quinn and Brenda Romero. The book’s interest in these women, and in critic Anita Sarkeesian who is named but not interviewed, seems to be primarily their experiences of assault and harassment. Another, Mattie Brice, is mentioned seemingly only because she is trans.

There are no extended interviews with any female players, while the book devotes entire chapters to, for example, a male player’s attempt to walk to the end of the Minecraft universe, a male player bingeing on Skyrim to process his wife’s miscarriage, and a male designer creating a game about his infant son’s terminal cancer diagnosis. The relegation of women to asides, one-off quotes, or survival narratives of personal trauma is disappointing.

Women have been producing and designing important, fascinating games for years now. Women have been writing insightful, important commentary on the genre for years now. If Parkin’s goal was to break video game criticism out of its rut of hyper-masculine triple-A shoot’em up play-throughs and present the art form as complex, emotionally nuanced, and diverse, he has let his audience down.

Instead of immersing us in lives different from our own (one of the genre’s strengths, as he notes), and by mostly focusing on gamers and designers like him, Parkin’s book misses its chance to reflect the complexity of the gaming landscape. Death By Video Game presents the video game genre as smaller, simpler and less challenging than it truly is.

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